Not Fade Away
by Indubitably Cynical
Summary: Things unravel. David, Juliet, Jack, James.


(1)

_It's not like Mom has never brought home men before. David still remembers the horror of being eight-years-old and meeting Goodwin, who had lasted for six months. Years later, David understands what Dad had meant shouting "rebound sex" at Mom, even if at the time he had cringed at the thought of his __mother_ having _sex_.

_But James, he appears out of nowhere and Mom sometimes just __looks_ at him in this way she's never looked at anyone, not even Dad. She lets him move right in, barely even asking David if he minds.

_James doesn't quite look him in the eye, ever._

_And the really, really weird thing is that Dad gets a girlfriend around the same time too. Dad, he hasn't had a real girlfriend since Mom, at least not one he had ever introduced to David, and then there's __Kate_.

_Mom tries, really tries, to give him as much attention as he's used to, but the fact remains that James makes her happy in a way David's never seen her. And Dad doesn't even really bother with the pretense that he isn't so enamored with his girlfriend that he seems almost reluctant to have David around at all._

_He thinks he might have missed something._

(2)

Things are the same and different.

No, that's not right.

Things are different.

It's like this: thirty-six years don't evaporate. Teenaged sons don't melt into blissful months of honeymooning in Dharmaville. Memories, reenactments, of a life lived in an alternate dimension, or something: _those_ are the invasion.

She loves James. She loves him so much it makes the world explode into color and leaves her spinning at the array of hues she never noticed before. She loves him so much it consumes her and throttles her until she can't even say it to him anymore.

She knows this.

But see, she has a son, here. A son, and her sister died from cancer, and her parents never got a divorce and she was married to Jack Shephard for almost eight years. This is here. This is her life without James Ford.

"I love you," she tells him as he climbs into bed, channeling the emotionally crippled Island-dweller Juliet _Burke_ and finding the assurance that this is a truth.

Tomorrow she'll pick up David from Jack's and this Juliet will be an unwanted voice in her head that cannot wrap itself around a son. Juliet Burke never wanted kids.

Tonight, it's the other Juliet, the one protesting such forced emotional intimacy with a man it barely knows, that needs to shut the hell up.

Someday, she imagines the voices will merge into a cohesive woman that can feed on both lives, both sets of memories. A Juliet that is damaged and scared and enlightened and loved.

For now, the cacophony of two distinct creatures with no constant to ground them to each other, and well. She just hopes they're not mutually exclusive.

(3)

_Dad's girlfriend Kate is around for six weeks. Then she's gone._

_David sees them all sitting together in the kitchen talking in hushed voices, Mom and Dad and James, and the air hums with electricity and the whispering makes his skin prickle and he has to run outside to get away from it._

_He thinks he might be disappearing._

(4)

He finds her in the hospital's locker room and there is purpose scorching in his expression and she can't quite draw a breath as his eyes suffocate her.

His palm presses against her waist and she leans her head back against her locker. "Jack," she whispers a warning, without a clue whether she is addressing the father of her child or the man she kept in a prison.

Both, she realizes reluctantly. Her memories tangle themselves until suddenly a decipherable picture forms in her mind's eye, a mosaic of Jack Shephard as an enemy and a husband and a lover and a comrade and a weapon and something unobtainable and _everything_. Both Juliets absorb it and something in her heart sinks at its decision.

"Did I ever tell you," he asks, voice quiet and deep and sex-drenched, "that every time we had sex before bed I dreamed about aquariums?"

He is hard against her hip and she turns her head to feel the cool metal on her cheek. It does nothing to bring down her temperature or slow her pulse. His fingers undo the top two buttons on her blouse and brush over the skin of her breasts. She stifles a gasp as his thumb finds her nipple through her bra.

"Did I ever tell you," she meets his eyes and adjusts her facial expression to hide her arousal, "that every time I visited you in those aquariums I dreamed about sex?"

Jack smiles like this is the time for it, leans down, his mouth brushes against her ear. "You never had to," he breathes.

Then he's tugging the fabric of her bra aside and his tongue darts out to taste her hardened nipple. Her fingers dig through his short hair and her eyes drift closed and she sighs. His hand covers her other breast and he touches her like they've never been together before, which they haven't, not really, not like they were meant to.

And maybe they're still not.

They have sex, right there, like some kind of doctor romance cliché. Jack and Juliet, the would-be enlightened incarnations. He pushes her skirt up to her hips and spreads her thighs and angles his hips against hers and fucks her into the lockers. Presses open-mouthed kisses along her throat and she digs her nails into his shoulders until they bleed. Until they just fucking bleed.

(5)

_"How did you meet my mom?"_

_James flinches. "Didn't even see ya there, kid. Where do you _go_ all the time?"_

_That's a strange thing to ask._

_"You just…showed up," he says instead of responding to James. A maelstrom brews in his stomach, impending panic. Unsettled._

_"Look," and James drops the spoon into his cereal so the milk splashes onto the table, "I ain't telling you _nothin'_ without your mother's express permission, Junior."_

_And David backhands the bowl of cereal so James is wearing it, milk and cheerios on his lap and down the front of his shirt._

_"_Tell_ me," David almost sobs as James' eyebrows knit forward in troubled shock. "Please, just—something's _wrong_."_

_"Hey, hey, I know it's rough getting used to a new boyfriend—"_

_"That's not _it_!" and David's voice is finally getting louder, except not, but it _should_ be. Instead his plea is almost a croak and now, now he's really scared. There's not enough of him to fill his body all of a sudden, or maybe this has been coming on for a while._

_"I'm not supposed to be here," David whispers unconsciously as his stomach knots._

_James puts a hand on his shoulder, and it doesn't feel like anything at all._

(6)

Juliet has a son. He is Jack's son.

Jack tears at her clothes, climbs on top of her in the backseat of his car, kneels between her legs.

She anchors with him inside her and finger-shaped bruises on her hips.

She floats off with James later that night, lets him rock into her with lazy intensity, and pretends to stay in one piece.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

Juliet exists.

(7)

_When he dissolves, it happens instantly as death itself, just as he's trembling and sitting down to play the piano, not even bothering to wipe the blood from his nose._

_His fingers brush the keys, sink into the first few melancholy notes, and then a light flashes behind his eyes and he's gone like the setting sun abruptly plummeting into the horizon._

(8)

She's forgetting something.


End file.
